Egrets in a Lotus Pond

Egrets in a Lotus Pond is a hanging scroll by Yamamoto Baiitsu in ink and color on silk, dated 1852 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2015.760). Painted in the artist's sixty-ninth year, four years before his death, the work departs from Baiitsu's standard bird-and-flower output in its concentrated and almost dense composition: the two primary pictorial motifs — egrets and lotuses — are repeated in profusion across the scroll, with several birds in different postures wading among lotus leaves and unopened buds, the long stems of the flowers carrying the eye upward through the picture. The Met's curatorial commentary observes that the effective use of perspective adds a naturalistic flavor that distinguishes this late work from the more emblematic single-motif scrolls of his earlier career. The painting demonstrates Baiitsu's command of the "boneless" (mokkotsu) technique, in which forms are built directly from washes of color and ink without preliminary outline, and it stands as one of his most ambitious bird-and-flower compositions. It was acquired by the museum in 2015, part of a sustained period of expansion of the Met's nanga holdings.